How to promote your job fair

Nov 06, 2017

When it comes to promoting your job fair or hiring event like an employer open house, it's important to prepare for the event to ensure a successful turnout. By promoting the event well ahead of time, and across multiple channels you can certainly bring in a solid stream of job seeker traffic.

Start with your career site

The company career site should be the first place to begin promoting your job fair or open house. Ideally you should begin promoting it at least 60 days prior to the live date. That gives candidates enough time to eventually see it and register.

Consider adding an event registration form to the page itself or you can use a site like JobFairing to collect registrants info. This will make your on-site registration process a tad easier and instantly adds job seeker information to your prospect list.

Get on social

Next you should plan a social media content roadmap for every week leading up to the event. Mention the event every week with pics and videos to get people excited. Use hashtags throughout your posts to make them more discoverable. We recommend terms like #hiring #jobfair #careerfair #employment #jobs #openhouse #jobsearch plus whatever keywords are relevant to your industry #marketing #sales, etc.

Schedule your posts to hit at various times each day to ensure a wide enough coverage since not every one that follows you on social will see it due to the way algorithms are set up.

Contact local media

Be sure to spread the word to local media outlets. They often cover hiring events and love to talk about companies that are hiring. make a list of every newspaper, magazine, blog, and television and radio stations in your area and proceed to send them a flyer about the event. Be sure to follow up or resend a few times to ensure they are aware the date and time. Sometime they may make a last minute decision to cover it.

If possible, reach out to the individual reports themselves who make have covered similar events in the past.

Use your data

If you already have candidates that have applied to you in the past dig into your ATS and get their emails. Then send these folks an email to jumpstart your registration list. We'd recommend at least 2 emails be sent one 30 days before and then another a week before the event.

Advertise, advertise, advertise

Settle on an ad budget and get to work advertising the event. You can get people to come through social media and the efforts mentioned above but in this tight job market you will need a way to break through the clutter to ensure strong attendance.

Advertise the job fair on social media (Facebook & Linkedin) and if you can afford it on other channels like local TV and Radio. Spending $500 to $1,000 is probably a good yard stick to go by if you are unsure on how much to spend.

At JobFairing we can do some of this for you if you pay to feature your hiring event. We offer 10, 20, and 30 day slots that will advertise the event across Facebook in your local market.